Jake and his dad joined 174 other riders from around the world last May, to tackle the Arava Institute-Hazon Bike Ride in Israel. Each participant in the week-long, 300-mile trek raised $3,600 to qualify for the ride. The money supports a scholarship fund for Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian students who study desert ecology at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, located at Kibbutz Ketura, near Israel’s southern border. Jake had distributed flyers to friends and family, and established an e-mail distribution list, urging donors to support environmental research in Israel and his own journery of a lifetime.

The demanding bike ride met all of Jake’s expectations. Rising before dawn each day, he biked past historic sites, such as Mount Scopus, Masada and the Dead Sea; he descended into Makhtesh Hagadol (one of five craters formed by water erosion in the Negev desert) and triumphantly conquered the steep climb out of it; he celebrated Shabbat and havdalah at the crater’s peak, where he marveled at its undulating basin, rippled with chalky white, brown and faded purple sediment; he prayed in the wilderness as wild ibex watched from the hillsides; and he learned firsthand about water management in the Dead Sea Basin. “I really experienced Israel close-up,” he says, “which helped me make a connection with the land.”